The primary mode of exposure to biothreats is via the lung. This is true for essentially all of the category A pathogens. The route by which pathogens enter the host plays a major role in pathogenesis and can significantly influence the efficacy of vaccines, immunomodulators and therapeutics. The role of this core will be to maintain murine pulmonary models of anthrax, plague, tularemia and cowpox as well as the hemorrahgic fever viruses. The core will serve several functions, 1) it will provide standardized pulmonary infection models for our regional RCE as well as other national RCEs for testing new therapeutic interventions and be available to investigators within our region as well as to investigators outside of our region on a contractual basis; 2) the core will develop new in vivo imaging techniques that can be used to assist in understanding host-pathogen pathogenesis as well as improve high throughput screening of therapeutics; 3) It will develop new models in other small species for the biothreats.